Archive for 2018
May 17, 2018
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER LIST: 5 Things Most Men Have to Learn the Hard Way in Life.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Boulder, Colorado, unanimously votes to ban assault weapons, high-capacity magazines.
The following is an actual exchange from my concealed carry class:
Instructor: “You need to travel through an area where your firearm is banned — what are you going to do?”
Me: “The speed limit.”
Boulder’s gotta Boulder, I suppose. But the next time you’re there, try asking any of the locals to define “assault weapon.” Or even just “magazine.”
A JUDICIAL BLOW FOR GENDER FAIRNESS: “On the pleadings, this court can find no reason at all why the result was Mr. Doe’s expulsion. The only inference [is] . . . gender played a role.”
NOW THAT’S MY KIND OF ANARCHY IN THE U.K.: U.K. man hits 160km/h in his motorized shed to break land speed record.
That’s right: In his motorized shed.
Because if you have a shed and a spare Audi RS4 engine laying around, this is the kind of thing that’s going to happen.
I THOUGHT EVERYONE KNEW THIS: Why There Are Holes In Pen Caps.
WEIRD HOW TRUMP’S “FAKE NEWS” CLAIMS GET SO MUCH TRACTION: Charles C.W. Cooke: On a Willful Lie from the Press.
COMMERCE SECRETARY: ‘Trade Tit-for-Tat’ with China Won’t be ‘Life Threatening’ to U.S. “‘China sells us far more than we sell them, and given the lopsided balance, they would run out of targets for tariffs much sooner than we would,’ argues Ross.”
The most powerful force in the universe might just be the American consumer. If not, it’s certainly the most sought-after.
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: The New York Times has a dreadfully dishonest headline up. I watched the interview, and Trump clearly, unambiguously, explicitly referred to MS-13. But via editing magic, The Times’ editors expanded the president’s statements. And if you do not think MS-13 are indeed animals, there are a few hundred rape victims and families of murder victims (mostly Hispanic, BTW) who might have a few choice words for you.
*UPDATE: USAToday pulls the same stunt.**
*UPDATE 2: AP corrects same “mistake,” admits that Trump was specifically referring to MS-13.
THE OTHER ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN SCANDAL:
When Eric Schneiderman resigned as New York’s attorney general on May 7 amid revelations he engaged in a pattern of alleged physical abuse of women he dated over the years, one of the Democrat’s first defenders was his ex-wife, a New York-based lobbyist named Jennifer Cunningham.
Schneiderman is “someone of the highest character,” said Cunningham, who asserted it was “impossible to believe” the allegations in a New Yorker report that Schneiderman abused multiple girlfriends over a period of several years.
Cunningham’s defense of her ex-husband drew some attention because of her position as a partner at SKDKnickerbocker, a Democrat-aligned public relations and lobbying firm that touts its feminist bona fides. Two of its most high-profile partners are Clinton White House aide Hilary Rosen and Obama White House aide Anita Dunn.
Though they divorced in 1996, Cunningham remained one of Schneiderman’s closest political advisers — so close that Cunningham worked as an unpaid adviser for Schneiderman before his fall from grace.
That pro bono relationship has been met with skepticism from some New York political observers and government watchdog groups — largely because of Cunningham’s position as a top partner at SKDKnickerbocker.
Indeed.
TERRY TEACHOUT’S PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN UNPERSON:
I won’t lose any sleep over the twin descents of Messrs. Cosby and Levine into the dark pit of disgrace. But there’s a difference—a huge one—between shunning such men and rewriting the history of which they are a prominent part. Not only was Mr. Cosby the first black man to star in a weekly dramatic TV series, “I Spy,” but “The Cosby Show,” for which he is now best remembered, was universally praised for portraying a middle-class black family in a way that appealed to viewers of all races. As for Mr. Levine, he was one of the half-dozen greatest opera conductors of the postwar era. Yet the Kennedy Center and Met Opera Radio seem to be trying to pretend that neither man ever existed.
Few of us like to admit it, but most human beings are impossibly complicated, none more so than artists. You can simultaneously be a great comedian and a sexual predator, a great musician and a pedophile. To argue otherwise is to falsify history, and to falsify history is to dynamite the foundations of reality.
I used the word “unperson” earlier in this piece. It was coined by George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” his 1948 dystopian fantasy about a totalitarian society similar to the Soviet Union whose ruler, Big Brother, rewrites history every day to expunge his enemies from the record books. To this end, his Ministry of Truth prints new editions of books and newspapers from which the names of politically incorrect “unpersons” have been scissored out, even as the offenders themselves have been jailed and brainwashed. As a character explains, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?”
Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much that the Kennedy Center has hosed Mr. Cosby’s name off its increasingly trivial roll of pop-culture sycophancy. But Met Opera Radio did something far more consequential when it chucked Mr. Levine’s historic recordings into the memory hole, an act of suppression that bears a distant but nonetheless definite resemblance to book-burning. By doing so, it effectively declared that great musicians must also be good men—a position that can be defended only by the tone-deaf.
In addition to the real-life acts allegedly committed by Cosby and the Met conductor James Levine, there’s that massive amount of badthink on display throughout even the most left-leaning old television shows and movies, which the modern left insists be judged by the current standards of #MeToo.
The Great Purge of 20th Century Mass Culture will be astonishing to watch, a much more insidious version of the way the arrival of the Beatles to America completely pushed swing music, America’s pop music from the 1920s through the early 1960s, into the dustbin of history. With no past to draw upon, what happens next to pop culture won’t be pretty, as Mark Steyn warned in a piece titled “The Totalitarianism of the Now,” written in August of last year, when the left was transitioning from toppling statues to toppling real-life men in pop culture and the fine arts:
I’ve said many times that, when a people lose their future, they also lose their past: There will be no West End theatre in an Islamized London – no Oscar Wilde, no Bernard Shaw, no Noël Coward, and eventually no Shakespeare. There will be no Berlin Philharmonic in an Islamized Germany — no Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner. There will be no classic rock on the radio dial in an Hispanic Florida — so no Motorhead, no Def Leppard, no Blue Oyster Cult. Such are the vicissitudes of demographic transformation.
But perhaps it won’t matter anyway. Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches,” Ray Bradbury wrote in the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Blackouts, hyperinflation, hunger: Maduro faces reelection as Venezuela deteriorates.
Since Maduro took over from Hugo Chávez — his mentor, who died in 2013 — Venezuela’s crisis has steadily intensified as a result of lower oil prices, corruption and a socialist system plagued with mismanagement. But as Maduro has sought to further consolidate power in the past 12 months, the economy, public services, security and health care have all but collapsed.
Armed gangs and Colombian guerrilla groups are operating unchecked on Venezuela’s borders. Pro-government militias are terrorizing urban areas, while police stand accused of extrajudicial killings. Four of the 10 most dangerous cities in the world are now in Venezuela, according to a 2017 study by the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think tank that studies violence.
Hundreds if not thousands of members of the armed forces are deserting, in part because of meager rations, according to military analysts. Power and water grids and the transportation systems are breaking down. In just the first three months of the year, Venezuela suffered 7,778 blackouts.
Saddled with a soaring inflation rate that has put food out of reach, Venezuelans, weakened and thin, are getting extraordinarily sick. Doctors say cases of diseases once thought largely eradicated — malaria, diphtheria, measles and tuberculosis — are not only resurfacing but surging.
In a nation that lives off oil, production is collapsing as plants break down and the bankrupt government cannot fix equipment. Venezuela’s unpaid creditors are beginning to tighten the financial noose, going after the country’s offshore assets.
[The Venezuelan oil industry is on a cliff’s edge. Trump could tip it over.]
At the state oil giant, 25,000 workers — more than a quarter of its staff — quit last year in a mass exodus. Fleeing workers are joining a flood of humanity, at least 5,000 people a day, exiting the country. The outflow has left schools without teachers, hospitals without doctors and nurses, and utilities without electricians and engineers.
“A failed state is one that cannot meet the most basic functions of government,” said Jean Paul Leidenz, an economist at Ecoanalítica, a Caracas-based analytical firm. “Venezuela now certainly has that characteristic.”
Unexpectedly.
And without comment from Bernie Sanders, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, et al.
The media seem finally to be taking serious note, usually framed around the upcoming election. One suspects they want to see Maduro go because he’s making Leftism look so bad.
PRIVATE SECTOR SPACE RACE: Chinese company OneSpace sends OS-X rocket to 40 km in maiden flight.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT WORKING OUT AS I HAD HOPED. Not the Onion: American Airlines bans insects, hedgehogs and goats as emotional support animals.
Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide for life.
IN SOVIET GOOGLE, YOUTUBE MUSIC LISTENS TO YOU: Google announces YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.
TREAT FEMALE RAPISTS LIKE MALE RAPISTS AND MAYBE WE’LL SEE FEWER OF THESE STORIES: Female Teacher Who Had Sex With a Student Won’t Have to Register as a Sex Offender. “She can also reapply to teach again.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MAXIMUM PRESSURE TARGETS IRAN: My latest New York Observer column. (bumped)
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Could reviving Woolly-Mammoth genes fight the effects of global warming?
Most of the hype so far has focused on bringing these shaggy beasts back to life using their permafrost-preserved DNA. But this time, scientists aren’t aiming for a “Jurassic Park” scenario — they’re not trying to bring back entire mammoths exactly as they were in the last ice age. Rather, they’re hoping to mingle some of the mammoths’ ancient genes with those of today’s Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), to increase the elephants’ tolerance to the cold, said George Church, a Harvard and MIT geneticist who is heading the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team.
Cold?
Fallen Angels was just a science fiction novel, right guys? Right?
CHANGE: Elite college stops offering ‘American Whiteness’ class. “After offering the course for the past three years, Grinnell College in Iowa appears to have scrapped a course called ‘American Whiteness’ that referred to whiteness as ‘a very bad idea.'”
It’s nice to see open racism receding from campuses.
DEMOGRAPHICS IS DESTINY: US births hit a 30-year low, despite good economy.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, GET-WOKE-GO-BROKE EDITION: Plummeting enrollment prompts $6M budget cut at Evergreen State.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Morning Briefing: RUSSIA, DACA, Net Neutrality and Much, Much More. “The New York Times has an awful, biased, misleading story ‘Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation.’ The piece is really a propaganda/PR piece for the intelligence community, extolling their virtues and how they toiled and battled with ethical dilemmas over the Clinton and Trump investigation. Gimme a break. It’s so obvious an attempt to get out in front of whatever will be revealed in the IG report.”